“Snake oil” – a denigrating term often used to cast doubt on those advocating natural healing solutions.

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Confirmed: Snake Oil Works Better Than Pharma Pills

Sayer Ji

For many centuries the Chinese used snake oil as a treatment for joint pain, arthritis and bursitis. They brought this folk remedy with them when they arrived in the US in the mid-1800’s to build the Transcontinental Railroad. That was backbreaking work. Synthetic pain-killers such as aspirin were not yet freely available.

When the Chinese workers offered their remedy to Westerners as a palliative it was likely perceived to be a “primitive” form of “quackery” by the medical experts of that time. This is one probable origin of the derogatory meaning of the word “snake oil.”

The ironic thing about modern pharmaceutical “snake oil,” i.e., petrochemical-derived and patented synthetic chemicals, is that they often have considerably less value than a placebo, and in certain cases may not even compare in therapeutic value to actual snake oil.

To prove the point, below are listed four remarkable studies, as cited on the National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic database known as Medline (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) referring to the potential therapeutic properties of sea snake and boa constrictor lipids – snake oil! – for inflammation and infection….

The point here is that when age-old invectives like “snake-oil” are hurled at those advocating natural approaches to healing by those who would claim synthetic chemicals are the only “real” or evidence-based alternatives, the “insult” itself reveals a subconscious acknowledgement that practically all things produced by Nature have medicinal value.

Let’s look closer at another example of purported “snake oil”: the traditional practice among the Maori and Chinese of eating earthworms to settle an upset stomach. Long considered an obscene, disgusting, “folk medicine” practice, these 3 scientific studies tell quite a different story:

In the first two studies, earthworms are shown superior to Ranitidine as an anti-ulcer, gastroprotective agent. Ranitidine is a chemical which blocks the H2-histamine receptors in the parietal cells in the stomach that produce hydrochloric acid, and is sold under the trade name Zantac.

Until Zantac lost its patent in 1997, global sales reached $1.6 billion annually. And yet despite these blockbuster sales, its value as a “medicine” compares poorly to the consumption of creatures that live beneath our feet, and who also, incidentally, make possible all the food we consume through their indispensable role in producing fecund soil. [See also “Water extinguishes stomach acid 175x Faster Than Some Drugs.”]